Air Asia QZ 8501 vanished early this morning local time, somewhere to the east of the Indonesian island of Belitung while en route to Singapore from Surabaya. The plane is still yet to be found.
This feels uncomfortably close to home right now considering my family and I just flew the opposite route (Singapore to Bali, specifically - but they're pretty close) two days ago, and we're flying Air Asia tomorrow to Jakarta.
I used to have a major phobia of plane crashes over large bodies of water and air turbulence during flights (ironic considering the number of times I've been on a plane in my life: too many), but lately I've been feeling mostly apathetic about it, considering that the likelihood of dying in a plane crash is statistically much lower compared to dying in a car crash. It's just that it's easier to picture escaping from a car crash compared to a plane crash (especially from a plane going into the ocean), and the crashes this year have been more high profile than usual even though the overall frequency was lower, so it seems a lot scarier than usual.
(Then again, I haven't experienced any turbulence on a flight as bad as one particular trans-Pacific flight from 8 or so years ago that apparently caused planes smaller than the one I was on to shift a few thousand feet... I thought I was going to die on that flight.)
It's really more like a "I won't be paranoid about it until it actually happens" kind of feeling though, since if it ever does happen I probably won't be worrying about it for very long anyway. Que sera, sera.
Still, for the families awaiting news on the fate of that plane... Lord have mercy.
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